Dan Rather Retirement Watch

In the space of a couple of hours, I have gone from thinking this story was a fantasy dreamed up by over-eager Bush partisans to being 99.9% sure that it's 100% true.

If the documents are forgeries -- which, by the way, they are -- Dan Rather will not be able to survive this. His liberal bias is too well-documented for him to survive a scandal that directly implicates that liberal bias.

Thus, I am proud to begin the Dan Rather Retirement Watch. If you like, you can take your best guess as to the date upon which he decides to "spend more time with his family."

I say he's gone by mid-November. They will allow him to report through the elections as a courtesy and out of respect for his long liberal service, and then he's bye-bye.

See ya, Dan! Maybe you can call up George Bush Senior and chat about being "in the grandfather business."

And Don't Miss RatherBiased! RatherBiased has been trying to put Dan Rather out of commission for years. I think now they've done their job a little too well and they've now put themselves out of business.

In addition to quoting a bunch of experts, they drag up this tasty quote:

In his legendary book on the 1972 presidential campaign The Boys on the Bus, author Timothy Crouse relayed how many of Rather's rivals on the White House beat resented him for his gung-ho approach to the facts.

"Rather often adhered to the 'informed sources' or 'the White House announced today' formulas, but he was famous in the trade for the times when he bypassed these formulas and 'winged it' on a story. Rather would go with an item even if he didn't have it completely nailed down with verifiable facts. If a rumor sounded solid to him, if he believed it in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as honest, he would let it rip. The other White House reporters hated Rather for this. They knew exactly why he got away with it: being handsome as a cowboy, Rather was a star on CBS News, and that gave him the clout he needed. They could quote all his lapses from fact, like the three times he had Ellsworth Bunker resigning, the two occasions on which he announced that J. Edgar Hoover would step down, or the time he incorrectly predicted that Nixon was about to veto an education bill."

But I trust that, like an NGO, they'll find some new problem to take on, now that they've pretty much solved their original problem.

Maybe literacy or African AIDS or something.

posted by Ace at 04:21 PM

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